Inside An Artful Apartment In Zaha Hadid’s High Line Building

When your apartment sits within a landmark, like Zaha Hadid’s swooping building on the New York City High Line, sometimes the best idea is to not get in the way. At least that’s what clients told Canella Design’s Carlos Canella when the time came to move into a 4,000-square-foot residence in the iconic high-rise. They wanted their 4 bedroom/4 ½ bathroom apartment to carry on the themes of Hadid’s common areas—which made Canella the perfect fit, since he’d worked on them with her.

“I’d worked on its interiors during my tenure as part of the building developer’s design team before opening up my own design firm,” Canella says. “I worked on the building’s interior design—furniture, lighting, and rug selections, and layouts, as well as worked with the Zaha design team on finish selections.” And so many of the materials were already to the clients’ liking: the kitchen’s veiny Calacatta Corchia Marble; the bathrooms’ Statuario floor and walls and Nero Marquina feature shower wall. As was the apartment layout, with an open plan living spaces so inviting they decided to extend it to the kitchen and family room as well, a collaboration with Tuna Architecture, which installed a peninsula with seating across from the stove.

Other interventions were mostly limited to a few overhead lighting elements to compliment Hadid’s curved soffits, and a feature marble wall in the kitchen to keep the gas and HVAC equipment from view. Hadid’s original “object walls” remain the foyer, and her unmistakable windows frame views in the primary bedroom’s walk-in closet and sitting area. Furniture echoes Hadid’s sinuous curves. “One of the challenges working on the base building was to find contemporary furniture pieces and bring them together to make the interiors feel warm, comfortable, and homey,” Canella says. “The apartment had very similar challenges. So the same approach was used here.” Who says modern has to be fussy?

Step Inside This Sleek Apartment By Canella Design

Soak In The Magic Of This Midcentury Palm Springs Retreat

Minneapolis-based designer Betsy Vohs of Studio BV didn’t just go West to find her dream retreat in Palm Springs. She went back into the past—both her own, in a desert landscape like the one she spent her college days in; and the neighborhood’s, for a house tucked into the Movie Colony neighborhood where Donald Wexler and Frank Sinatra once called home.

It didn’t hurt that the house had a recent history as the lush residence of landscape architects. Vohs complimented their ample planting with new ones of her own. In the front, she says, the landscape “was curated to create more intentional spaces and experiences between the front garden and the lounge under the ancient olive tree.” In the back, a renovated pool joins outdoor kitchen and living areas. “My favorite details,” she says, “can be found within the visual connections between the interior and exterior.”

That interior is a good 1,300-square-feet, divided between two bedrooms and a pair of bathrooms. “Its architecture is quiet,” she says. “The house itself melts away.” Instead, the eye travels to her vibrant contemporary art collection, including pieces both found back in Minneapolis and closer to home, around the Joshua Tree and Yucca Valley. And it travels through the windows to the work outside, too, including an eye-catching pool sculpture, a custom piece by her old Minnesota friend Merick Reed. 

Vohs has her eye on the future, as well. The house is off the grid, with new solar panels and full battery backup fueling up in the desert sunshine to run all night. That’s just another way the residence, in all its Mid-Century splendor melts into the surrounding landscape. “You almost don’t experience the facades and forms of the home as an object,” she says. “That is the magic of this home.”

Explore This Art-Filled Home In Palm Springs

Art Meets Urban Planning in Nanyang City, China

Planted into the rich soil and verdant fields of Central China, Nanyang City is the fertile ground from which the millennia-old Chu-Han culture grew. While the bustling metropolis is home to more urban forms of life these days, farmlands still surround it. Nanyang Wanyue City Square & Landscape Sculpture by One Plus Partnership pays tribute to this local agriculture via a striking structure that’s part artwork and part city planning. “Our goal is to attract different ages to this place,” One Plus founder and design director Ajax Law says.

Erected upon a 31/2-acre plot of land, the sculpture portion is what first catches the eye. The One Plus team welded together approximately 1,600 steel-plate squared rods, coated in either taupe or emerald automative paint, into a pair of forms. The taupe rods rise some 60 feet toward the sky; the green appear to run through them, resulting in a sort of abstracted, human-scale skyscraper. At night, the horizontal and vertical bars are illuminated by wall washers hidden among them and in-ground LED spots.

The geometrical arrangements reappear below as steel flower ponds overflowing with Buxus sinica, a native plant. Around them, varying tones of granite tile illustrate One Plus’s idea of “thousands of miles of fertile field” as viewed from the air. “Farmland doesn’t have to be
a symbol of obsolescence,” One Plus cofounder and codesign director Virginia Lung notes. “Humans get the nourishment to continue their lives from them.” And, in the case of the Nanyang Wanyue City Square & Landscape Sculpture, to gaze, take selfies, and reflect.

10 Questions With… Roberto Palomba and Ludovica Serafini

Ludovica Serafini: When you are young, you both have the same tastes even if you have different experiences. So it’s quite natural to share the same dreams. After so many years, we still share the same vision. We want to innovate, not to change things or shock people, but just for the sake of innovation. We don’t want to live in the comfort zone.

ID: What were those early days of the firm like?

RP: In the beginning, we were working on small projects with small brands. But then, we started to be conscious about the quality that we worked with. We began designing bathroom products and some of those innovations remain as the standard worldwide. It was crazy. We started from a design vision plus an architectural vision.

LS: Another important part of our job was always thinking about sustainability in design. From the beginning, we were using sustainable materials. The second product we designed was a recycled aluminum table. And this year, we designed a huge table for Kartell also using recycled aluminum with a recyclable ceramic slab as a top. You can lacquer the aluminum and glaze the top the same color.

RP: It’s not a matter of using a green coat. We just designed a shower with brass made of more than 80% recyclable aluminum. We’re also using fabric made from plastic from the oceans, and we know where it’s coming from. When we first started, bathrooms were not at all designed by designers—even the journalists didn’t want to publish our designs. They don’t publish toilets! And then a few years later they said, “This is amazing!”

ID: Speaking of Kartell, when did you start working with them?I

RP: It’s been more than ten years. I had met Mr. Claudio Luti in Moscow and said I would like to work with you. I’m very shy and never do this, but Kartell is a very important brand, with an industrial vision that’s close to how we think. They said no thanks because they already had designers. But after a couple weeks Mr. Luti called us back and said I know you’re great in bathrooms, how could I expand my business in bathrooms? I said that you need some confidence; you can’t just make things just using plastic. We designed something using ceramic, and some years we used metalwork, which was super successful. The collections for Kartell were challenging, but they were great. And this year, we’ve made a little sofa. It’s a love story.

LS: The relationship with brands is not just a matter of sharing design, it’s becoming a family. We talk to them almost every day. The ideas don’t just come from a brief; they come from a discussion.

RP: The idea to share a vision with the designer and the designer to not think they are God—it’s an intimate connection where it is not my design or theirs, but ours.

ID: And what do you do when you both disagree with each other?

RP: We fight for five minutes and then she makes the decision. She’s the boss.

LS: That’s not true!

RP: The only real problem now is time. Sometimes when we have no time, I don’t want to say you’re nervous, but you have to be quick in arguing and solving. But this is good! Being a male and being a female is good because we give two different sides of the coin. And our studio has a lot of young people with interesting viewpoints to share.

ID: What was the brief for the LA ROQQA project?

LS: It was very difficult! The owner was very specific about the project. Creating a hotel experience today is not just about making a nice hotel—the problem was finding out what to add and what to take out, because an experience is made from a balance of adding and removing.

RP: Today, boutique hotels have become showrooms. It’s like grabbing a shaker, putting in some design and making a cocktail—this could be a daiquiri or a vodka-tonic, and you just substitute the name of a designer. But it’s not a matter of how you shake together some goods. It’s about how you make the experience, which depends on the nature of the building and the countryside.

LS: When you’re working with an existing building, you have to create a new dream and a new function. When you’re renovating a house, it’s different because it’s already a house. But here you are giving it a new soul.

RP: You can see when a place has or does not have a personality—whether it’s a showroom or design—since what they are missing is a soul. When Café Cost was destroyed, we missed a moment of the history. Public spaces like Cipriani should be kept as a heritage landmark.

LS: We have to behave like we’re creating a movie and put all these elements together, not just for decoration.

ID: How do you create a space with a soul?

RP: By studying the bones and the body. It’s like Frankenstein’s Monster.

LS: When you’re designing a hotel, it’s a place and a building; it’s historical and contemporary. You have to know what kind of people the place is for.

RP: We design for the people who are going to use it. When we design a table, we think about how it’s made, what it costs, and how it will be used. So, we start with the body and then we add the electricity—that is our competence in putting together what we’ve learned. We have so many chairs and so many hotels, so why do something new? The reason is only to be better, which means the new place will have a soul.

ID: What is the soul of the Casa Piana project?

LS: It’s not a precious building, but it’s in Salento and the soul of that place is the materials and the light.

RP: It’s a place between two seas, and like all the places between two seas, there is a special reflection of light. It’s very important.

LS: There were some historical elements that are very nice so we kept it, like some of the wood. In this region, the problem in a building is that is has to be protected from the light.

RP: You arrive at the top of a staircase in a small courtyard with a structure with an iron frame; it was very basic but crafty. Though it was not as unique, it was precious, so we kept it. Houses have a special roof on the top, and we put in a kitchen there.

ID: How did you decide what kind of a life should be on the roof, and what should be below?

RP: Design always starts from the people who are going to live there. Food in Salento is basic, but the kitchen is the core of the house. In the summertime, you don’t cook since it’s too hot. But in the evening, everyone stays on the roof and cooks together. This is the job of the architect, to understand where the life goes and the flow that makes the life easy.

ID: What is flowing down the pipeline for you?

RP: We just had 17 launches at Salone… I’m very happy about the outdoor collection we designed for Talenti. And we worked on a collection with Fendi Casa for a few years, working with the colors and materials.

LS: We were working with DNA of that brand, in which the structure of a sofa was not made of standard cushions and did not just look like their bags translated into a sofa.

RP: Sometimes the fashion brands are too connected and we don’t see that as good design—like a shoe becomes a cabinet. This is a pattern we see everywhere. But we need good furniture that brings the brand’s values into real design. A chair is a chair and has to respect the laws of a chair. So when you design for Poltrona Frau, it’s different from Zanotta. The brands have their own values. You have to use their values as an ally, not as an enemy.

ID: And how is your summer looking?

LS: I will be exploring Sicily.

RP: I will be waiting for her in our home in Salento, sleeping and eating a lot and getting large like a cow!

Step Inside This Madison Avenue Duplex Full Of Color + Texture

“I typically like to start a design process with a clean slate, free of preconceived ideas of what the project wants to be,” says architect Andrew Magnes. But from the moment he first saw a 4,500-square-foot Madison Avenue duplex apartment with 360 degree views of Central Park, he knew what had to be done. “I wanted to keep the perimeter’s attention on the spectacular views,” he said. But downstairs was another matter entirely.

Magnes referenced the work of Louis Kahn for reorganization, devising a central core with services including the mechanical spaces, storage, and stairs. New hybrid HVAC, electrical, and plumbing systems brought the space up to date, while the team only brought ceilings down when absolutely necessary. Downstairs, the kitchen and dining room open to each other, with hidden telescoping doors for privacy and sound absorption. Shiny Sparkle Studio cast a three inch-thick glass work counter for the kitchen, illuminated by interior coves in the elliptical, plaster ceiling. A copper backsplash leads the way to the wet bar, near a circular media room of blue lacquer.

Two sets of stairs—to the north, an anigre veneer structure and to the south, a corten spiral stair by Juan Alfredo Design—connect the lower level to the upstairs primary suite with alba Chiara marble shower and sink areas, and to three more bedrooms whose bathrooms each boast its own tone of three-dimensional tile.

Andrew Magnes Architects worked with Fawn Galli Interiors on the design. Galli similarly wanted to compliment the views. “We really thought about Central Park as part of the color scheme and feeling of the interiors,” she says. Warm grey walls bloom with compounds of colors and patterns. “I wanted to create something that was joyful, fresh, fun, and energetic,” she says. In other words, a space that’s entirely itself.

Walk Through This Joyful + Fresh Duplex

10 Questions With… Stephen Talasnik

Stephen Talasnik Shares His Latest Work

Interior Design: How did you first become interested in design?

Stephen Talasnik: I grew up in Philadelphia, surrounded by industrial sites: an oil refinery, the Navy shipyard. When I was eight or nine, I entered a competition sponsored by the Elmer’s glue company. Glue was a new product at the time, we’re talking the early 1960s. The project was to make something creative using Elmer’s glue. I had just visited Hershey Park that past summer, and I decided to build an entire roller coaster out of toothpicks. That was my foray into what could theoretically be sculpture. I went to RISD and got a degree in painting, then went to graduate school in Rome and taught myself to draw more intensively through copying traditional Italian Renaissance architecture and figurative sculpture.

Then I moved back to Philadelphia, curating and maintaining a studio practice and commuting to Japan, where I was teaching at a program at Temple University in Tokyo. While I was there, I would travel through Thailand, China, the Philippine, Malaysia, and Korea, and I learned how to build by hand using natural materials, learning the art of building through massless engineering. The most important component to pull out of that was a real passion for bamboo construction, specifically scaffolding, which reminded me of the roller coasters from when I was a kid. So I became very much fascinated with linear structures—not hard-edged linear structures, just gesture-aligned linear structures. It was engineering that got me interested in sculpture, but what I call fictional engineering.

ID: What do you mean by fictional engineering?

ST: Pioneer, a permanent piece I did in Tippet Rise, Montana, which is a timber frame structure, started out as a model. And the model was born from the assembly of various types of triangles. I was taught in a night school class at Cooper Union that the triangle was the most important geometric component in building, and if you could master the use of it, that’s all you need to know. So for the piece, I relied on single frames, similar in execution to a loaf of bread where each slice is a frame, and then you assemble these frames one at a time and then collectively group them. The ambition is to rely on intuition, and that comes out of drawing things over and over again. It’s fictional in that it is void of any reliance on mathematics. It’s just the reliance on the senses of touch, the tactility of the object. It’s a leap of faith, a belief in your own instincts and self-knowledge to create something which is large.

ID: That was the scale of the piece at Storm King, right?

ST: I was invited to participate in the 50th anniversary exhibition, which was my first opportunity to work large and to work out of doors—and also to work with bamboo. My idea was to create a massive glacier-like structure that was indicative of how a glacier might move. It was not about climate change, but about the power of ice as architecture. So I created a large-scale bamboo structure that relied on geometry and triangulation, and it took over the side of a hill and appeared to be wedged into the land. It was assembled with a group of young artisans and it survived for two years. A hurricane came through the Hudson Valley, the piece was covered in ice, there were wind storms, all kinds of adverse conditions, but it did survive.

ID: Do you enjoy these larger-scale projects?

ST: I’m still enthralled with the capacity of intimacy within a work of art, and the idea of how to take something small with the intimacy of a drawing and then make it large. Keeping it handmade, you are in the position to preserve some of the intimacy but monolithic. I don’t want the viewer to be intimidated. I like the idea of, when they get larger, to make them as transparent or translucent as possible. So I’m using materials that are still linear, that enable you to look through a piece and have access to how the piece is put together. I rarely put skins on pieces, although I’ve just recently started adding skins to some of the models.

ID: Why?

ST: In part, it relates to my interest in anatomy. Skin is reliant on bones to give form.  But I realized I could make infrastructure without having any idea as to what the actual sheathing would be, because it would depend upon the material that would be placed in such a manner that it would conform to the irregularities of the infrastructure. You would start stretching the material over the infrastructure and you would find a new form, without a preliminary idea as to what it’s going to look like. And that’s part of the beauty.

ID: What was the idea behind Floe?

ST: I wanted to create the equivalent of a fictional archeological museum devoted to the excavation of a part of Philadelphia. It’s composed of five different units, with the primary part being the creation of a glacier-like structure out of the materials I’m most familiar with. It’s 12 feet tall, and it occupies a space of about 400 square feet in footprint. Accompanying it is a sort of monolithic wall chart, a blueprint of sorts, which is a fictionalized drawing based on charts by cartographers examining the potential flow of icebergs. Ironically, the primary part of that drawing relates to an aerial drawing I did for the creation of the sculpture at Storm King, so there is a connection between the first large piece and very last large piece that I did.

ID: What else is in the show?

ST: There’s a collection of handmade debris, which is the result of a schooner crushed by an iceberg. And there are individual sections of what could be called glacial architecture, which is the idea of how a sculpture might look if it were designed by a computer—it has all the elements of linear structure, but it doesn’t have the skin of an actual iceberg. So there’s the mapping of ice movements, the digesting of this large-scale wood schooner by an iceberg and the crushing of it, and the debris field left out as as a result of the melting of the ice, and then an examination of how icebergs might be built. There’s no digital component, all done by hand by simple, intuitive movement.

ID: We often think of icebergs as agents of destruction, taking down boats, and their destruction by climate change is also a warning sign. What is interesting to you about them as architectural objects?

ST: We’re making something small-scale with the notion that they could potentially be large-scale. Taking something monolithic and putting it within grasp of your hand. And what’s important is you can see a sense of the hand building them. Even in buildings we see in the skyline, we don’t see the hand as part of it. We see the hand that’s part of the infrastructure, but there’s a skin put on it. So what I try to do is expose the possibility of what the infrastructure of an iceberg might look like, put into a language that is contemporary enough to relate to how we create mathematical systems now.

ID: What’s important about the framework of a fictional museum within the actual museum?

ST: The nature of a museum is to compel people to be restricted to a space and look at things they might not normally have the opportunity to. When you’re seeing something you experience out of doors—a tree or a boulder or a mountain—within the confines and intimacy of a room, there’s a different relationship between the object and the human experiencing it. When it’s out in the open, it’s for all to use. It plays a functional role. When you bring it into a museum, you’re denying its functional role.

Also, I’ve always loved museums that are grounded in science. I’m dealing primarily with natural information, and manipulating it, and this museum is large enough in scale to enable the objects I’m making to create a language that connects the viewer to the object. But underneath that, there is something perhaps that might be possibly optimistic, because optimism resides in the education and awareness. Whether we choose to do anything about it is a much broader issue, but it’s triggering the imagination and means different things to different generations. Do you want to bring your child in and say: Well, this is an iceberg, and icebergs used to be things that inhabited the world? A museum affords this almost irrational sense of time travel, because every object is imbued with a sense of connection to another time and place. We collect artifacts connected to humanity, we’re always living with this fascination that an object is a time traveler in and of itself. The context of a museum is important because it enables people of the present to go back, and it also enables them to project into a future.

ID: What’s in your future beyond this show?

ST: I have a show of 30 selected drawings at the Tayloe Piggott gallery in Jackson Hole, with the common theme of fictional engineering. They are all pencil drawings, made over a twenty-year period. And I’m working on a commission for the National Academy of Sciences in Washington, D.C., examining their mission and the architecture of its building, which is celebrating its 100th Anniversary. I’ve spent days at the building doing rubbings of all the low-level bas reliefs, which I’m going to use to create a large piece. My passion is building. A problem exists in that I see engineering, or at least the type of engineering I do, as gestural drawing. And fictional engineering is a way of translating the gestural line into a three-dimensional structure. It all came out of the experimentation of an eight-year-old playing with toothpicks to make roller coasters.

This School Turned Coffee Shop is an Adaptive Reuse Gem

In 1936, the Public Works Administration completed a beautiful Art Deco building in South Philadelphia to house a vocational school with a range of offerings, from culinary arts to welding and bricklaying. Just shy of a century later, in 2013 the school closed; developer Scout LTD eventually bought the space with the idea of transforming it into a new home for the city’s vibrant community of makers.

All those artists need fuel, of course. So local architecture and design firm Kaminski + Pew carved out a space on the ground floor for independent cafe, Two Persons Coffee. “Our goal was to create a space that intentionally blurs the narrative of place and time,” explain firm cofounders Kevin Kaminski and Alexis Pew. “We wanted to invite a sense of wonder. What is existing? What is new?”

As for what’s already on hand, the answer is: Almost everything. To recast some 300 square feet of what once was an auto body tool room into the coffee shop, the team relocated, wire-brushed, cleaned, and painted the school’s existing fencing. Granite panels, removed from walls and resurfaced, is the face and top of Two Persons Coffee’s monumental counter. Classroom furniture takes on a new life as café seating. “The biggest challenge was finding a contractor willing to salvage and repurpose materials from the building,” add Kaminski and Pew. “Conor Roche from ROC buildings was up to the task and a great partner.” The walls and ceiling, they say, “are clear coated to preserve the existing patina and make the space safe for food.”

And as for the design duo’s second question? “The small but mighty coffee shop quickly developed into a destination,” they share. Not just for the tenants of the building—50% of which are women-owned and 80% of which are self-owned—including spaces for furniture makers, tattoo artists, painting studios, designers of all disciplines, and charitable organizations. But also for locals in the area. “Two Persons has become a vital hub,” note Kaminski and Pew, “for both the building and surrounding community.” A good lesson, then, in adaptive reuse.

Transforming an Industrial Building into a Creative Hub

This Dubai Villa Offers an Artful Take on Tropical Modernism

After relocating from Hong Kong to Dubai, a young couple with a penchant for collecting art moved into a 6,600-square-foot, six bedroom villa in the city’s Meadows neighborhood. They loved the views of the lake, but longed for a cozier house. Nakkash Design Studio’s design director, Omar Nakkash, knew just what they needed: A poetic take on Tropical Modernism that made room for a family—and their ample art collection.

“The couple is full of life and bubbly,” Nakkash says. “They are well travelled, so their style is eclectic, with a very strong emphasis on practicality. So the brief was to utilize the indoor and outdoor space to best fit their lifestyle.” This meant softening boundaries inside and out, and focusing views. The main entrance looks out onto the backyard and lake while a large step-out window defines the private dining space, washed in sun from a large skylight. A curtain wall deftly separates the dining and living space. As for the upstairs, it’s made accessible by an elegant white staircase with a solid concrete balustrade. “We approached [the staircase design] as a sculpture,” he says, with “a pure monolithic handrail” in crisp white solid concrete. Omani beige marble forms steps that carry through the warming tones of the textured brown wallcovering. A substantial pergola creates more room by the pool.

Throughout the home, the couple’s art collection is on full display: The symmetrical living area frames an abstract Balinese painting and portraits of Native Americans on fabric from the House of Pierre Frey. The dining area’s accent wall of green sisal panels displays Dann Foley’s installation of 12 eggs, their shells broken to reveal gold leaf interiors. Wood carvings from Hong Kong pop up throughout the TV room. But the couple’s prize collection is surely the dining area’s picture wall, decorated with a museum’s worth of family portraits.

Inside the Dubai Villa Refreshed by Nakkash Design Studio

Alda Ly Architecture Brews Up a Female-Forward Taproom in Manhattan

The earliest brewers were women, who cultivated the fermented beverages at home. Since then, men have come to dominate the industry—but TALEA is changing that, one tap at a time. The first female and veteran-owned production brewery in New York City, TALEA recently opened its inaugural taproom in Manhattan, following a pair out in Brooklyn. Fittingly, they selected the woman-run design firm Alda Ly Architecture (ALA) to conceive the interiors, which pay tribute to histories of gender activists and its West Village neighborhood’s legacy of LGBTQ+ organizing.

TALEA focusses on sours, but its taproom trends sweet, with a palette of saffron and mango, mauve and olive, and warm brass. Housed in a 1920s building on the city’s Christopher Street, the taproom incorporates an original spiral staircase and extensive street-facing windows. “We opened up the space to provide as much open area for the front dining room,” says ALA founder and principal Alda Ly, “and brought the bar front and center to highlight the taps with their extensive selection of beer.” That bar—all mauve and quartz, with beckoning stools—is an obvious destination, but patrons who carry on towards the back will find Revolution Room, a gathering space for up to 10 people, and the hidden Snug lounge with dark velvet seating made cozier still thanks to a vintage, reclaimed fireplace mantel.

While the Snug is available for private rentals, TALEA is otherwise focused on becoming a regular haunt for thirsty locals. For the opening, they’ve partnered with nearby hotspots: a collaboration with cocktail bar Dante yields “Dante’s Flurry,” a kind of Garibaldi beer; a lager inspired by Don Angie’s pinwheel lasagna; and a Pumpkin Pudding Ale inspired by the Magnolia Bakery treat. Best of all, sales of the Village Hazy IPA will benefit The Center, the city’s LGBTQ+ community organization. “We wanted the bar to be a welcoming beacon for all people in the neighborhood,” says Ly. We’ll drink to that.

Explore Hidden Spaces Inside TALEA’s Manhattan Taproom

This New York Office Doubles as a Contemporary Art Gallery

When the owner of Orange Barrel Media, known for its out-of-home media and smart technology—think futuristic 21st-century billboards—began conceiving ideas for a new office in New York City, fittingly, attention turned to creating visual interest. The owner had an ample, enviable collection of contemporary art he wanted to show off, but the airy, 3,500-square-foot NoHo, Manhattan office was more open-plan than art fair in organization.